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Kathie Lee Gifford fell for Frank Gifford’s “greatest pair of buns” in a hallway — and stayed married to him for 29 years, through a tabloid sting and a sweatshop scandal.
Kathie Lee Gifford spent 15 years on Live! with Regis and Kathie Lee turning her marriage into daily material, nicknaming her husband “the F-Man” and cracking jokes about his cooking. But the real story behind that marriage was messier and more resilient than the sitcom version she gave viewers each morning — a relationship built on a 23-year age gap, survived a public affair, and ended only with Frank Gifford’s death in 2015.
- Kathie Lee, freshly divorced from composer Paul Johnson, met NFL Hall of Famer and ABC broadcaster Frank Gifford in 1982 while guest-hosting Good Morning America — and later admitted she noticed his physique in a hallway before falling for him.
- In May 1997, the tabloid The Globe filmed Frank in a New York hotel room having an affair with former flight attendant Suzen Johnson; Kathie Lee chose not to divorce him and leaned on her Christian faith to rebuild trust.
- Frank died of natural causes at age 84 at their Connecticut home on August 9, 2015, closing out a marriage that began in 1986 and produced two children, Cody and Cassidy.
A Meeting Engineered by a Basset Hound
Frank Gifford was already a broadcasting fixture when he sat in for a guest-hosting stint on Good Morning America in 1982, twenty-three years older than Kathie Lee and twice divorced, first from Maxine Ewart and then from Astrid Lindley. Kathie Lee, meanwhile, was a correspondent on the show fresh off her split from gospel composer Paul Johnson. She later told co-host Hoda Kotb on Today that she did, in fact, believe in love at first sight — she’d “sort of” experienced it herself.
The setup was almost comedic. Kathie Lee was prepping to shoot an Alpo dog food commercial alongside a Basset Hound when she spotted Frank walking down a hallway ahead of her. She didn’t mince words about what caught her eye, describing it as “the greatest pair of buns” she’d ever seen. Frank had his own version of the story in an interview with the Television Academy Foundation, revealing he’d actually tried to set her up with one of his best friends over lunch instead of pursuing her himself.
Fifteen Years of ‘The F-Man’ on Live!
The pair married in 1986 and had two children, Cody and Cassidy, while Kathie Lee built her career alongside Regis Philbin on Live! with Regis and Kathie Lee from 1985 to 2000. Frank became a running character on the show without ever sitting behind the desk — Kathie Lee referred to him on-air as “the F-Man” and mined their domestic life for anecdotes on a near-daily basis, turning a Pro Football Hall of Fame halfback into a punchline about laundry and dinner plans.
The Globe Sting and the Fight to Save the Marriage
The marriage’s defining crisis hit in May 1997, when The Globe ran a sting operation, filming Frank in a New York hotel room having an affair with former flight attendant Suzen Johnson. The footage detonated across every tabloid and newscast in the country, and Kathie Lee’s marriage suddenly became the most scrutinized in daytime television.
She didn’t divorce him — she turned to her faith to forgive him, while admitting rebuilding trust was a painful, long-term ordeal.
Kathie Lee later discussed the fallout in interviews reflecting on how she processed the betrayal, framing the recovery not as instant forgiveness but as years of grinding, deliberate rebuilding.
Sweatshop Scandal and a Show of Loyalty
The affair wasn’t the only scandal testing the marriage that decade. In 1996, Kathie Lee’s namesake clothing line sold at Wal-Mart was exposed for using Honduran sweatshop labor, a controversy that threatened to define her public image as much as her television career. Frank defended her publicly against the accusations and, in a gesture that got less tabloid coverage than the affair, personally handed out envelopes of cash to unpaid New York garment workers connected to the scandal.
Frank Gifford’s Death and a Lasting Reflection
Frank died of natural causes at 84 at their Connecticut home on August 9, 2015, ending a marriage that had spanned 29 years and outlasted a hotel-room sting, a sweatshop scandal, and decades in front of cameras. Kathie Lee kept revisiting their complicated love story publicly in the years that followed, still processing the marriage’s ups and downs before she stepped away from NBC’s Today in 2019.
What stands out watching Kathie Lee tell it now isn’t the scandal — it’s how openly she still brings up the hallway and the Alpo commercial decades later, the same joke she was making about “the greatest pair of buns” back when Frank was still alive to hear it.
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